Melissa DeRosa Leaves Nothing Unsaid

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47Most New Yorkers will know the name Melissa DeRosa, right hand to Governor Andrew Cuomo. Melissa's brand new book has been the talk of the town this week as she reveals her side of the story and the final days of the Cuomo administration with punches at Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul, Letitia James, and more. As the title tells us, Melissa has nothing left unsaid here. Let's get to the conversation.

1:17Well, joining us now on Open Book, a personal friend, Melissa DeRosa, who is so many different things, but she's soon to be a bestselling author. Let me just hold up the book, What's Left Unsaid. It's a great picture too, by the way. My life at the center of power politics in crisis, And of course, Melissa is a former communications director who happened to last longer than 11 days in her job. She was the chief of staff and secretary to Governor Andrew Cuomo. And by the way, I mean, the book is phenomenal. And my producer and I were talking about how great the book was because it's so real. And I want to start with Dina DeRosa because I think it's important part of the story because I think you're dedicating the book to your Nona.

2:03and I had a Nona, you had a Nona and it's your, your, your grandma, Dina DeRosa obviously left a big impact on you. And the reason I'm starting there is because when I read the book, you're trying to do what's right. And I think you must've gotten that from somebody. And I think it's from her, or at least she's part of the mosaic of people that taught you right from wrong. So let's start there. Yeah. I mean, look, it's, it's funny. People have a lot of misperceptions about who I am, where I come from. A lot of people write me off as a Nepo baby, somebody who was born with money and influence and all of these things.

2:36And the reality is it couldn't be further from the truth. I was a kid that was born in Rochester, New York. My parents didn't have two nickels to rub together. They had three kids under three by the time they were 23 years old. I spent the formative years of my life under my grandparents' roof with my nunno and nunna. And they informed so much of who I am, who my siblings are, this unrelenting work ethic. If you work hard enough, then you can provide for your family. You can do some good in the world and live out what to them was the version of the American dream. They came to this country, you know, fleeing World War II at a time when Italy was overtaken, obviously, by Mussolini's army and the Nazis.

3:17And so, you know, we came from relatively nothing but taught that if you worked hard enough and if you believed in something enough and you were willing to put the time in that you could be anything. And it meant so much to my grandparents to be able to see within one generation, you know, their granddaughter become the highest ranking unelected official in the state of New York under Andrew Cuomo, who they also held in such high regard and had so much pride being Italian American. So yeah, it was, it's a great American success story in that way. You know, you were, I mean, listen, I mean, the facts are the facts.

3:52You were the most powerful unelected person in New York state government. And I believe, and I think this book reflects that you handled it with a tremendous amount of responsibility. And, you know, you love the public service. I'm hoping to God you'll return to public service based on reading the book. But I want to talk a little bit about your dad as well. Didn't your dad have a pretty big impact too, Melissa? Undoubtedly. I mean, he, I write in the book about the fact that when I was a little girl, he was working on a congresswoman's campaign and he brought me alongside with him on the campaign trail, knocking at doors, walking in parades.

4:30And I fell in love with this world of public service and what it meant that you could do to help people in a meaningful way, like my grandparents who didn't have a seat at the table. And he then went into the union movement and he cared so deeply about the union movement and what it meant for fairness and for collective bargaining rights and making sure that the voiceless had someone at the table who were arguing for them effectively. And so I very much shadowed him my entire life. My love of government and politics stems directly from him. And, you know, it's been a blessing and a curse. Doors opened, opportunities presented themselves.

5:06But for my entire life, I've never been able to sort of escape his shadow. And I've always struggled with, especially as a young woman, you know, trying to step out of that shadow and say, yes, I'm proud of everything my father has done. I've done a lot in my own right to, and I would like to be judged on my own competence and accomplishments and what I've done separate and apart from my father. I probably don't have to state this, but I'm going to state it. You and Andrew, you and Governor Cuomo have that in common, right? You both had looming figures in your lives, and therefore you were trying to fill those shoes in some ways out of respect, but you're also trying to carve out your own identity.

5:40And I feel that the success of the two of you caused a lot of consternation in the Democratic Party. So I want to set the scene, though, and have you talk a little bit about the crisis that's besetting the world. I'll take you back to January, February 2020. You and Governor Cuomo, others in the public health and safety area of the state of New York, realize we're going to have a problem. You know, we have some dysfunctional federal government situation going on and some lack of leadership there. there's a vacuum. You guys step into the vacuum, set the scene. Why the press conferences? What did you expect to happen with these press conferences?

6:19And then I can tell you my opinion of what happened in the press conferences. I don't know a person in my life that doesn't say that when you and Governor Cuomo were on air, it wasn't comforting to them and they didn't find some salvation in the idea that there were very smart people working on this problem. So set the scene, the decision to do these conferences, and then let's talk about what unfolded thereafter. So, you know, something else just quickly, and we're calling back to something you just said, where the governor also had this situation where his father was these, you know, larger than life shoes to fill.

6:51And he and I would have conversations when press stories would be written about me, and it would say, you know, Melissa DeRosa, daughter of powerful lobbyist, become secretary to the governor. And I would turn to him and say, at what point is the press going to start defining me as me and not in the vein of my father. And he looked at me and he said, you know what, when I find that out, I'll let you know. Yeah. Amen. Because the same still happens to me to this day. And I'm a 60 year old man. So yeah, there are lots of similarities between the two of us and how we were raised and in the shadow of these larger than life fathers.

7:23But when COVID hit, you know, New York very quickly became the epicenter, not just of the country of the world. And what was very clear was that your former boss, President Trump and the Trump administration had absolutely no desire or wherewithal to lead in that crisis. And what we realized very quickly was that there was a palpable fear that was not just in New York, but around the country, around the world. People were yearning for information, looking for facts, looking for any level of leadership. And the daily press conference wasn't something that we set out to do in a calculated fashion.

7:58They just sort of happened. We started doing them and through them, we understood the reaction to them and the importance that all of a sudden, every day people had something that was reliable, something they could count on. Every day at 1130, we would go on television, give them the facts, tell them what we knew, tell them when they were things we didn't know, explain what we were trying to do to attack the problem. And then the second half of the press conferences were really the governors showing the side of him that he had never shown anyone, which was vulnerability. And he would talk about his own fears for his children, for his mother, how it was impacting his own family in a very, his brother, his brother had COVID at one point and how it was impacting him personally.

8:41And at the time people compared them to FDR's fireside chats and, you know, the role that Winston Churchill played at the pinnacle of world war II. And I think in that moment, that was what he was doing. He was the de facto commander in chief and the whole world looked to us for information and for comfort. And when I look back on that time period, yes, we built field hospitals. Yes, we were in an international arms race for PPE. Yes, we created Surgeon Flex, one unified hospital system. We did all of these things. But when I think about what I'm most proud of, it was those press conferences and stepping into that void and providing real information and real leadership at a moment when the country needed it most.

9:22Yeah. No, listen, it was wonderful waterfall in so many different ways, but it also, unfortunately, in human life and in politics, there's a refraction, which you also write about. So it now costs you guys, because now you're being thrust into the global arena. The competence is being showed to everybody. And as a result of which the knives come out, even from people inside your own party, you learn that the the Judases and the Brutuses are in your midst. And so now they're coming at you. You explained it in the book, but let's explain it to my listeners and my viewers. Why are they coming at you at a time where you should be being applauded by these people and they're in your own party?

10:07So why are they coming at you, Melissa? Tell my naive listeners and viewers, not the people that have had 50 hatchets in their back like you or me, about the state of politics in the world and how it really operates? You know, I think that there was a little bit of Icarus to this, right? He flew so close to the sun and there's nothing that the American press loves to do than build people up, then to tear them down. And we had gone through this sustained period where it was all positive, all affirming, everyone sort of recognizing the place in his, his place in history and the importance of what we were doing.

10:40And then it's almost like on a dime, it flipped and you had the far right who viewed Cuomo as a threat nationally, Trump certainly, but the far right in general viewed Cuomo as their greatest threat nationally as someone who could run and win and, and, you know, loom over the party for a long time. And they had Fox News and the New York Post and other right-wing publications sort of going after us, guns blazing. And then on the far left, which Cuomo has always been, he views himself as a progressive. I think of him in this day and age. He was a left of center, you know, Democrat. He was not a communist.

11:16He was not a socialist. He was not someone out pushing extreme views. And as a result, the Working Families Party, the DSA, the AOCs of the world were always sort of waiting in the wings with the pitchforks wanting to go after him. And so then it was like, bam, you had this perfect confluence of events where someone comes out with one specious Me Too allegation on Twitter. She in the background goes and starts organizing a campaign of women. They come out, you know, one by one saying things like he put his hand up my waist for a photograph. He kissed me on a cheek. He called me sweetheart. And because of the moment we were in of the hyper hysteria of the mainstream mess, mainstream media, excuse me, combined with sort of this overreaction of the Me Too movement, it was like there was no differentiation between rape or assault or an off color comment.

12:05or a kiss on the cheek, all of them were thrown into the same cauldron. And it was, you know, an executable offense. And so suddenly everyone was just given a number regardless of what the allegation was, regardless of what the infraction was. And that was it. And that was it. From that point forward, as I write in my book, we were basically on a slow death march to August 3rd, when Tish James issued her report. So guilty until proven innocent, of course. And every allegation, any micro allegation is treated like a death sentence. And there's a judge, jury, and a trial in the open press. And so what we're both describing is cancel culture.

12:43And what was interesting, I just want to test this on you because I had so many questions when I was reading your book. But one of my big questions is, I don't see Governor Cuomo, and he's a personal friend, so sometimes I'll slip and call him Andrew, which I apologize for because of the lack of formality. But Governor Cuomo did not represent to me a woke politician. He represented a person that was focused on doing policy. He wasn't necessarily left or right, but he's more about right or wrong. And I sort of feel that this threatened that whole value-based analysis that the left forces their political leaders through.

13:21And so he became an instant target, meaning, God forbid, if Governor Cuomo would arise to the presidency and, you know, darken the woke movement, or he could somehow lead us out of the wilderness of this woke, anti-woke nonsense that we're facing from a culture war perspective. And so they went super hard at him. Am I missing something, Melissa? No, no, you're 100 % correct. I mean, I actually write in the book that there was this group of democratic socialist legislators that were caught in a chat room where they were literally plotting in February of 2021 before the ball really gets rolling.

13:57And they say, how do we make it impossible for Andrew Cuomo to run again? And they say, and excuse my language, Alessandra Bianchi says, we're going to need a motherfucking army. And it was clear that this entire thing was calculated. It was a campaign, you know, and they couldn't have done it alone. The press was along for the ride. People weren't scrutinizing anything. To scrutinize was to smear, to question was to shame. And so we were all sort of stuck in this box. And Cuomo, who, you know, for his entire career, sort of rejected the wokeism. And, you know, I talk in the book about the history between the Cuomo family and the New York Times in particular, and how the Times editorial board always had this sort of disdain for the Cuomos because they were these elitist white wine drinking, as Mario Cuomo used to call them, you know, Manhattanites who looked down on the Cuomos from Queens, who, you know, were mechanics and who were, you know, didn't go to the Ivy League institutions that they all went to.

14:56And so there was always this inherent tension between the Cuomo family and between the hard left, the liberal wing, you know, that then morphed into sort of this wokeism. So 100%. And when they saw their shot, they took it. 100%. But in the meantime, they were straddling the line, right? Because they were being sycophants to him in public. But behind his back, they were moving on. I mean, listen, Attorney General Letitia James, she said, and you write about it in the book, that a lot of the accusers were not credible. And yet all of a sudden, when there was a little bit of blood in the water, the report comes about and they're, of course, credible.

15:32But then we learn after the fact that they weren't credible, which is obviously what you and I have put up on social media, just the whole facts of the situation. And so I want to talk about something that the reason why I think, and I'm just going to say this, I think women who read your book are going to be like, okay, this is like a real woman. I want to have like a cup of coffee with her and ask her about her life. You write very vulnerably and very openly about your fertility struggles, about the problems that you had in your marriage. And so you took your guard down in this book, Melissa.

16:04So take us through that. Take us through the decision to do that, which, of course, I admire because I always try to hit my weaknesses or whatever the potential weaknesses in life are. I try to address them head on. You know, I had the issue with Trump, which obviously you and I have talked about. I had a situation with Sam Bankman-Fried. I try to talk about these things very openly. But I'm so impressed with you doing this. So give us why you did it and tell us what your thinking was and where are you now on some of these issues? I decided that if I was going to write this book, I had to tell the whole story.

16:37If I was going to tell the story, I had to tell the whole story. And I think that in order for people to really understand the arc of those two years, especially through my eyes, because as much as this story is about Andrew Bomo, it is my story. To understand what had happened through my eyes, I think you had to understand where it started from. And when people always ask me, where does it begin? And I was like, I, there's this conversation I had with my now ex-husband in January of 2020, where we were on the precipice of getting separated. And we have dinner the night before he's leaving for three months and we're not supposed to talk for three months.

17:10And we're setting the ground rules of how are we going to deal with each other? And I say, so we're just not going to talk for three months. And he turns to me and he says, well, unless it's an emergency. And I said, well, how do you define an emergency? And he's like, I don't know, but we'll know it if, if it happens. And then it's bam, COVID happens a month and a half later. And so I think that in order for readers to get it, and I think you know this firsthand, the way that all of us are portrayed in the press, those of us in public service, high ranking officials, elected officials, we're caricatures, right?

17:42We're either evil or we're good. We're right or we're wrong. There's no gray. And part of what I tried to get people to see in this book is that people are people And we make mistakes. And when nobody's looking, we're falling apart. And when you're acting tough and like nothing's bothering you, you're actually suffocating inside because your marriage is falling apart. Or when you're out of the office for 30 minutes and no one knows where you are, it's because you're at a fertility specialist being told that you probably can't get pregnant. And all of these things inform the people that we are.

18:16And I think we do a great disservice to the public when we try to present all of us as characters in the world absent that context. And so I felt like if I was going to do it, I had to really do it. You know, Andrew said to me, Governor Cuomo said to me once, he said, you know, there's no smart politicians. I said, well, what do you mean by that? He goes, well, just think about it. Negative campaigning and negative ads work so effectively that when you go into the general public, you say, are there any smart politicians? Say no, because Andrew gets hit from the left. He gets hit from the right.

18:47you know, the right leaning politicians are getting hit. You know, I mean, there's no smart politicians because we know that negative campaigning and tar and feathering works. You know, I was a Jersey Shore cast member when I was in the White House. I was, that was Tony Soprano on the Potomac. I think that actually came from the Financial Times. Financial Times, you know, I mean, it's like, okay. I mean, you know, and this is the sort of stuff you have to deal with. I'm cool with it because I'm a big boy. You don't go into public service and expect to be be treated well. But I just love that you were so open about this.

19:19I'm going to toggle back to some policy though, because I think this was indicative of what was going on. In one of the chapters, you write about the war between Andrew Cuomo and Governor de Blasio. Now, most New Yorkers don't realize how much power that the governor has over the city of New York. A lot of our state Constitution authorizes and empowers the governor in terms of the budget, even police force, police personnel, things like that. You write Governor Cuomo wants to put 500 new or deploy new police officers into the subway system. And Mayor de Blasio does not want to do this. He's being attacked by Mayor de Blasio and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

20:01So for normal people out there, Please help us understand why the left doesn't want there to be quality of life and a feeling of safety in the streets of New York or on the subways. What are what are they trying to prove by allowing that sort of breakdown in the social contract? Well, and I get into this in the book because so much of it played out after the George Floyd murder, where you had this massive defund the police movement that was afoot, which in my view is couldn't be more stupid, you know, ill conceived movement. And I don't know the likes of which this country has ever seen. But in December of 2019, there was sort of the precursor to that where we were starting to see a spike in crime in the subways.

20:44And the governor wanted to put 500 additional cops on the subways. And AOC and de Blasio and others came out and said, we should be using those resources in order to make sure that there are service repairs and that there are improvements to service. And our point was sort of like, no one cares if you're on time on the train if you're worried about getting shot on the train. And there's just this fundamental disagreement between the far left and I think the center and the rest of the world about public safety. And they think and I do think that there's a nuanced approach, right? You need mental health professionals.

21:19Not everything is solved with jail. A lot of things are solved with going into mental health facilities and health you need through social services, of course. But when there is a cop on a platform, people are less likely to commit a crime. That's just the reality. You've got cops on subway, like on individual cars. People feel safer. It sends a message that there's someone watching. And so throughout the book, I talk a lot about the George Floyd situation in the aftermath of it, this tension between the defund the police movement and sort of the millennials and everybody else. And that was just one in a series of situations where you saw Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio butt heads over the course of COVID and even more over the course of their tenure.

22:00Yeah, it's just great stuff because it's so clear. I mean, I wish I frankly, I wish two things. I wish I had met you 10 years ago. You would have given me better advice. It probably would have lasted 12 days as opposed to 11. I wish I had read this book 10 years ago because it breaks down really what happens, you know, in the reality of the situation. Some of us, myself included, go into these positions somewhat naive. I mean, I'm embarrassed to admit that, but I think I was a little naive about the sandbox. I thought people that were wearing my jersey would play nicer in the sandbox. But in fact, they're kicking sand at you and trying to stab.

22:37I mean, I mean, I don't know. I felt like they would take your eyeball out with like an ice pick. They drop it in their martini glass and they'd still talk to you, Melissa, while you were bleeding, you know, like nothing happened. it. You know, I want to mention a couple of names to you and I want you to have a reaction to them. OK, Governor Kathy Hochul, Governor Hochul, who I speak about in the book and who I've spoken about extensively since she she became governor. You know, I think that she is well-intentioned. I just think that she is not equipped for the job. I you know, you look around and this isn't me and my words.

23:10I mean, we have a migrant crisis going on in New York City that I think could lead to the collapse of social services in New York City, and literally no one is in charge. And I think a lot about if we were still there, if Andrew Cuomo were still governor, a year ago, we would have handled this. We would have gotten it under control. We would have ensured that we got federal funding that was necessary. Governor probably would have flown down to Texas and, you know, gone to fisticuffs with Abbott. I mean, to let, you know, this happen and get so out of control and act almost as if they have absolutely no role to play.

23:42I mean, the same thing is happening, you know, there was a big Buffalo snowstorm where she just deferred to the locals who didn't close the roads and people died in their cars because no one stepped up and exerted leadership. The legislature, she defers the legislature on everything. And so I just believe that the role of governor of the state of New York is one of immense responsibility. And there's a lot expected in terms of leadership. And she's just time and again, failed to step up to the plate. It was a little Stalinistic though, too, how she, and you write about this, she wiped out all of all of Governor Cuomo's aides.